Erdoğan announces 30-percent wage rise for civil servants, pensioners

Click to read the article in Turkish

People in Türkiye saw in the last month both an increase in the minimum wage going up to 54 percent to 8,506 Turkish lira (455 US dollars) and a structural change in its retirement arrangements, which will allow more than 2 million citizens the right to retire.

On top of these changes, President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan announced yesterday (January 3) a 25 percent pay rise for both civil servants and pensioners.

"I want to give good news to all our civil servants, retired civil servants, and all other pensioners that we will increase their pay by 25 percent," the president declared at a meeting of Memur-Sen (Confederation Of Public Servants Trade Union).

The president today announced a further 5-point raise during his Justice and Development Party's (AKP) parliamentary group meeting.

Normally, the payment increase rate for civil servants and civil servant retirees was 16.48 percent, and the rate for SSK and Bağ-Kur retirees was 15.40 percent.

The announcement of the President thus entails a payment increase of around 8.5 percent on top of the existing payment increase regulations.

These hikes remain, however, a drop in the bucket as Türkiye's inflation for December 2022 was 64.27 percent according to officials figures and 137.55 according to the Inflation Research Group (ENAG), an independent group of economists calculating the inflation every month. Meaning that civil servants and retirees will remain seeing their purchasing power deteriorating.

Nonetheless, the head of state hailed their efforts to combat the declining position of civil servants in the wake of the country's heavy inflation.

Noting that before the AKP came to power in 2002, the wage of a public servant was only 392TL and as of July 2022 is 9105TL. ''The last 20 years of Türkiye already go down in history as the years when wage earners were the strongest against inflation and were never crushed,'' Erdoğan remarked. (HA/WM/VK)